(FIC) Only if you run (Superman+Batman, PG-13)
For mithen 's birthday! HAPPY BIRTHDAYYY! :D I grabbed a bunch of bunnies you had pushed my way and tried to tie them together.. I hope you have a wonderful day!
Title: Something fast
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Superman+Batman
Word Count: 4300+
Summary: Bruce is back, and Clark is back, and neither of them is doing too well on their own.
References: Oh man. Okay, random references to JLA New Maps of Hell, JLA Divided We Fall, Superman Beyond, Final Crisis, World of New Krypton. THIS GOT A BIT OUT OF CONTROL.
Spoilers: For War on Superman, if you don't know what happened to Kal, Kara and New Krypton, and for Return of Bruce Wayne, if you haven't read RoBW #2.
I´ve had my frustrations about the pains of daily life
I´ve tasted degradation and found the lace and candle light
But we have the weights we have the measures of our days and nights
I´ve had my frustrations but now I´ve found my place
And you will make it
But only if you run
-Only if you run, Julian Plenti
He's staring at the monitors, heedless of everything going on around them. Or at least he seems not to notice, but Clark knows better than that. Knows him better than that.
He moves closer, steps behind the chair. The smell of leather, Kevlar and jet fuel is like an aura around him, the bouquet of a dark, strong wine. Around the edges there is the faintest of smells. Nothingness. The void.
Ever since he came back -and Clark clings to this thought like a life line: he came back, he survived, he is here- there is something about him that doesn't quite fit. Like a black hole, he commands his attention every time they're together, swallowing the world around him into the darkness between the folds of his cape. And that smell of the infinite void.
"B," he says softly, and Batman startles. "Why don't you let that be for a while? Everyone gathered to see you, you know. Time to be all smiles," he says, teasingly. The black clad shoulders before him move a fraction, straightening just enough to make him look determined.
Batman tilts his head, and he's looking at Superman out of the corner of his eyes. He doesn't turn to look at him -and it aches just a bit, the way Bruce has been avoiding his gaze- but there's a small smile on his lips, something that wouldn't be a smile on any other man.
"All smiles. Okay," Batman says and pushes his chair back to stand up. "No guarantees." Bruce turns to see him, as if he's about to say something, but then quickly looks away, his jaw setting.
Clark feels his stomach turn. Everything is still so awkward, and he wishes it wasn't, he wants-- he wants his best friend back, he wants to hold him, he needs-- he doesn't know what he needs. He feels like he has a hole inside himself, cold and endless, something that hurts so much that he can't look at it without feeling like he's drowning in rage and despair.
"Don't."
Clark is startled by the the commanding tone, but Batman is now scanning the room. The Hall of Justice is full of people, fellow heroes and friends, but they are giving them space, talking among themselves, letting Batman approach them at his own time. Some of them are intimidated by the man and give him space out of a mix of fear and respect. The others know him well enough not to crowd him.
"Don't go," Bruce's voice only seems vaguely directed at Clark.
Clark answers anyway. "I'm right here."
Batman turns to face him, their eyes locking. The impossible gravity that pulls at Clark intensifies and Bruce leans forward, clamping a gloved hand on his arm. "No, you aren't. Not all the time," he says, a thread of infinite sadness in his voice.
Clark's throat constricts and his eyes burn. The ghost image of debris in space is never far from his mind, the absolute silence, the cold memory gripping his heart. Batman pulls off his cowl and his gaze is unwavering, dark blue that speaks of abyssal depths. "We can do this," Bruce says.
Clark wants to curl inside the shadows of Batman's embrace, let the darkness that seems to have touched his friend at the end of time take over the empty spaces in his heart. Instead, he nods. They can do this.
---
"If you go back, you'll kill everyone! Don't do this!"
The words echo in his mind as he activates the time sphere, leaving his friends at the end of time.
He'll come back for them before the time line collapses, or he'll fail to save the 21st century and it won't matter, anyway.
He can't let this happen again. He can't.
He can never go home.
---
He can feel Superman's presence two steps behind him, a lodestone that pulls at him with irresistible force. Everything is a blur unless he's concentrating in the here and now, his attention fully on his surroundings. But it's hard, and there are so many people, people he doesn't even remember meeting.
He wants his life back, his family, his city, his friends. His own brand of madness, fighting crime and dealing with psychopaths. Not... this.
He wishes he could forget. Tells himself eventually he might. It's too much, so it might slip his mind, go dormant like a dragon, a volcano.
A curse.
Clark is touching him.
The world refocus around Clark for a second, and then it's lost again as he studies the lines around his eyes, the downward turn of his mouth. There's a permanent strain in his jaw, and his eyes that should be as blue as the clearest sky are clouded with grief. The set of his shoulders, the tightness of his back. Even his balance is off, like he carries a great weight.
"Bruce," Clark says, his voice finally piercing his thoughts. "Do you have a headache?"
Bruce nods, grabbing the excuse so he can get out of here.
Clark is touching him.
Superman leads him to an empty room at the Hall of Justice -the lab, Batman recognizes it, and with a pang of exasperation notices the equipment still hasn't been upgraded. He had meant to, had planned to do that after Orion's murder case had been solved, but then...
"Earth to Bruce," Clark says, and he has a small smile on his lips, but it quickly turns into a frown as Bruce collapses over a chair. "Are you okay?"
"I can't be Batman," he says, the words spilling from his lips like a confession, and he feels a pang of loss when he hears them. "I can't be Batman anymore. It's too much information. I can't focus. I didn't think it would be so hard to be here."
"Here?"
He can hear the restrained pain in Clark's voice, and he wants to punch himself for making him sound even more tight wounded than he already does. He needs to get himself together. For Clark, at least. For now. He throws his head back, closes his eyes. "Here. Now. The present. This present, that is. I was-" he gestures vaguely with his hands, then cuffs one of his ears, leaning against his hand, trying to make the darkness behind his eyes stop spinning. "I was going too fast and now I can't seem to fall back in step."
He can hear Clark crouching in front of him, and he opens his eyes. "You will," Clark says, his voice like steel. "We can do this."
He nods once, unconvinced, and then a thought crosses his mind. An excuse, meaningless, and he feels laughter building inside him, an impulse completely out of control. He's on the verge of a nervous breakdown, he realizes, but he can't seem to stop shaking. He starts chuckling, the world falling out of focus again.
"I just need more time."
---
By the time he realizes he needs help to close the hypertime dimension rift, the 21st century is a cauldron of hellish creatures wrecking havoc across the fabric of time and space. He understands now how the rift works -it took a long time, figuring out Hypertime at Vanishing Point- and of course it's not linear, there is no reason for it to be linear with cube time.
Five times he jumped through time.
Five cracks in the fabric of reality.
The 21st century is lost, now. Thanks to the influence of the cube time forces, he can't restore the 21st century from any point of the time line. He needs to move outside the time line. Find a way to copy a segment of time from a different string where he never made it home, where the rift was never created, and graft it into this time line. And then he can close the rifts in the past. Without something to save, patching the past will be useless.
The time sphere has two directions: back and forward, he needs a way to make it move sideways.
He gets to work.
---
Bruce isn't laughing anymore. The silence in the lab is suffocating, the only sounds being Bruce's steady breathing and his own choked sobs. He can't look at Bruce. His eyes are empty, his gaze far away, and Clark is alone.
He can't do this alone.
They have done things that are unexplainable. Impossible. Unthinkable. They have defeated terrible odds, they have snatched victory out of defeat again and again in this partnership that seems so incongruous, so unlikely. They have been to the end of the universe. They have been to the end of other universes, to the places beside the universe where everything is more.
Clark has held inside himself the Bleed, the substance that sustains reality itself, he poured it into Lois Lane to save her. He built a miracle machine and wished for a happy ending.
He feels anything but happy now.
He feels a hand threading through his hair, and Bruce shifts under his weight. He doesn't dare look up from where he's kneeling, leaning over his arms on Bruce's legs.
"What are you going to do?" Clark asks, his voice low and ragged. His eyes are dry but his throat hurts.
"I don't know. Fix it." Bruce's fingers close and he's pulling Clark's head back to make him look at him. "We didn't do all that to come back home and be a complete mess, did we?"
"It kind of looks like we did," Clark says, shrugging Bruce's hand off. Bruce snorts, and he's smiling now, a real smile. Even if he's not looking into Clark's eyes, Clark has never been able not to smile back at him. "Any ideas?"
"Well," Bruce starts, and then he meets his gaze. Clark feels the imperious pull again, the way it soothes something inside him, a restlessness that's been with him since the battle with Darkseid. "I know what's wrong with me. Do you know what's wrong with you?"
Clark looks incredulous for a moment. Can he even begin to list what's wrong with him, with the world? But then he nods. New Krypton. He's lost Krypton again. His adoptive planet destroyed Krypton's second improbable chance, and because Lex Luthor hasn't turned up and General Lane committed suicide and a thousand other nonsensical, absurd things that shouldn't happen but do, there's no justice to be had. New Krypton is gone.
"I can't fix what's wrong with me. Only--" Bruce snorts again, "Only time can."
Clark can see that his eyes are not empty, he's not gone, but it feels like Bruce is falling into the event horizon, collapsing into a black hole.
"What about you, Clark? Can we fix what's wrong with you?"
Clark breaks the eye contact, his teeth grinding, his lips a thin line. "I don't know. Can we undo the genocide of my people? Find them some justice? Not that... not that justice would bring them back. Rao," he says, sitting back on the floor, getting some distance between him and Bruce. He props his head on one of his hands, trying to hold himself upright. It's an impossible weight, the guilt, the anger, the resentment, the grief. "Everyone, Bruce. I researched the customs and culture of Krypton for years in the Fortress, devouring all the data I could find on my parent's planet, trying to figure out how they lived, what they thought, trying to fill in all the blank spaces that the Fortress AI couldn't. It could tell me the dates of the festivals, but it couldn't tell me about the children squealing with delight at the Artists guild's sculptures. It went on and on about the complexity of the light shows for the festival of Rao and Yuna, but it did nothing to prepare me for the reality of it, the sense of kindship, of... it was so rich, Bruce, I only lived in New Krypton for a year, and I felt like I was barely scratching the surface. I met such great people. They never backed down, you should have seen them, they were so stubborn and-- and they did atrocious things, too. Rao, they were terrible and kind and strong and awful." The words kept spilling from his lips, each memory a thorn on his side, his voice raw. "Aunt Alura, she... you would have liked her, she was..." He took a deep breath, unable to put into words the kind of woman Kara's mother had been. "Complex. So complex. Everything was..."
"Alive," Bruce says softly once it's clear Clark can't continue. "It was real. Not just pictures and textbook information on the Fortress. It was alive."
"It's all gone. Everyone is dead."
The silence that falls over the room is filling Clark's lungs like warm water. Kara. If this is killing him, he can't imagine what it's doing to Kara, to lose her family all over again, to have her home snatched from her again. And he can't even say anything, what is there to say? All he can do is hold her, and he feels so brittle. A low keening sound escapes his lips with every breath, and he feels ashamed to be weak, to be so weak in front of Bruce. He wasn't been able to save New Krypton, and here he is, wailing like a child, like that might make a difference.
"What should we get to first?"
Clark closes his eyes tightly and shakes his head, confused. "What?"
"Which of these two things should we tackle first? Bringing the responsible to justice, or getting New Krypton back?"
"Bruce--"
"You see," Bruce says, leaning forward, and the event horizon is gone. Bruce is the black hole, no longer falling into it, but inhabiting it. "I don't think there's anything we can't do, Clark. And you need this. You need this to not have happened. When men are pushed past their limits, they break. I can't have you bearing this. It's all very simple, with the right perspective."
"I won't break. I won't let this break me. This is not so simple, Bruce."
"I did not mean you," he says, a distant smile on his lips. "Clark, we can make this simple." Bruce hesitates then, and he seems to be anchored in the now for a moment. "Do you know what I did to the time line?".
---
He finds the moment before Darkseid falls into the black hole at the beginning of time, just after the New God sends him to the past via the Omega Sanction. He could stop Darkseid from sending him back, but it'll just create another time line. Time line A of Universe Zero has been anchored by the hyperfauna infestation he caused by opening the rift at the 21st century. But here, at this moment, with time collapsing into itself, he can access other time lines. If he wants to access cube time, this is where he has to do it.
He waits for the right moment.
The right moment is the wrong one the first eleven jumps.
The twelfth time, he waits until Superman makes his wish in the miracle machine.
'Let there be a happy ending.'
Bruce smiles, the longing he's feeling making him double over in the time sphere. He needs to get home. He can't bear this anymore.
He jumps, and this time he makes
it
to
cube
time.
----
Clark is looking at him, horrified, and he still won't say anything. Bruce explains his theories, wild as they are, because he can't stand the way Clark is looking at him.
"See, Space B is like a virus. Or no, not a virus. A bacteria, complex enough to have genes and-- you see, in cube time, Space B is a primitive life form. The orrery of worlds, the strings of time-- the music of the spheres itself, if you will, it's just a primitive creature. So I thought-- it's just building blocks after all, like proteins, so if a time line is split in two whenever anything has two possible outcomes, then decisions -- no, uncertainty itself, that's the building blocks of time lines. It's... you can split them and graft them if you find the right point, insert your custom-arranged proteins. Or if you can't arrange them -I suppose hyperfauna could, if they cared to engineer Space B lifeforms- but if you can't, then you can take pre-existing code and graft it."
Clark says nothing.
"I didn't destroy any time lines. I-- I don't think I did. At Vanishing Point, I located Time line A of Universe Zero, and all the other time lines diverge from this one, at least in our Space B." Bruce puts his head on his hands, closing his eyes. "Or-- that's how I saw it. I mean, how was I supposed to see it? A Space A creature looking down at Space B from Cube Time. Clark, I don't know. I just.. I could see the point where I had broken the membrane, the omega sanction and-- and how we had punctured Space B, the infestation growing from the 21st century to the past and to the future. Consuming it. And all the time lines it intersected, they were being infested too."
Bruce just sits there, thinking, trying to forget the vast eldritch things that had touched him, the things he had seen that could not be perceived by human eyes but that could not be ignored, either. "See," he says after a while. "New Krypton is out there. We can get it back. We can.. graft it. Or copy it. We could... we could steal it, too, if we find a string that ends there. The possibilities are... infinite."
"Bruce."
Bruce hadn't tell them any of this when he had picked them up again at Vanishing Point, recruiting their help to close the rifts in the past. By the time he had picked them up, he had already erased the infestation from the time line.
"Are you telling me that you.. deleted a part of the time line? And replaced it?"
"I didn't delete it. It was set adrift. Expelled from our Space B, so the infection could consume it but not touch everything else. I... I did destroy the 21st century, though. A version of the 21st century."
"But how?"
"It wasn't hard. From Cube Time." He can't explain it, he can't explain what happened to him, what had to happen. He doesn't have any words for it, he can't even understand it. It had just happened, because-- because it had to.
"Bruce," Clark says, his voice still raw, but full of concern instead of drowning with grief. "Are you okay?"
Bruce laughs, and he suspects the laugh itself is answer enough. "No. Not... yet."
Clark nods. He seems thoughtful for a long moment. "I want New Krypton back first." He says, determined. "I don't want anyone to forget what their part in this was, but..."
"A second chance. For New Krypton."
"I don't know. Second? It feels like we have had so many chances now."
"It's all relative. Second chances are limitless."
Clark raises an eyebrow at that. "We need you to slow down."
"After this is done."
Clark is looking at him, and he feels the pull, the need. He wants to collapse in Clark's arms, to be held together by his strength. He closes his eyes again and leans back on the lab chair, trying to drift off.
---
"Before the eclipse starts, you have sketch this. One of us at each eclipse, holding a piece of the memetic program."
Everyone's staring at him like he's insane except for Superman. None of the others faced Z, none of them saw Kyle drawing a concept that worked as a machine when you looked at it. But Clark had, and once you have Superman on your side, things are a lot easier.
"I don't see how this--" Rip starts, but Superman interrupts him.
"It will work." Superman is looking at him, a confidant smile on his lips, something like awe in his eyes. "I trust you."
"Good." He calls up each of the sigils in the time sphere's screens. Together, they form a lattice that makes him feel dizzy to look at, something that seems to repel the ghost touch of the things he'd faced in cube time.
"Superman's shield is in there," Hal says. "And... Wonder Woman's. The Lantern. Flash's lightning..."
"Yes. All of them," he says, looking at the finished seal. He worked in everything he could, each piece of the Age of Heroes a benediction to all living things. "Let's go."
One by one, he drops his friends at the right moment, just minutes from the eclipse. They'll have time to spare to engrave the sigils.
Booster is the last one. Before he walks out of the time sphere, he turns to look at him and flashes him a parting smile. "Good to have you back, Bruce."
Bruce nods, unable to say anything.
Back.
He'll be back soon.
Not to a burning landscape, not to the end of time. Not the apocalypse he had brought forth for the 21st century the first time around.
He's finally going home.
---
"I want you to see something," Clark says after a while, and stands up, hovering in front of Bruce, waiting for the other man to acknowledge him -to come back from wherever he is.
He offers him a hand, and Bruce takes it, standing up. The pull is there again, a thrill that starts at the point of contact and spreads to every inch of his body, demanding more.
He leads Bruce through various halls until they reach one of the bays. Below them, the reunion goes on, and up here there's a faint sound of laughter and conversation that was missing at the lab. He gestures towards the bay window, and stands beside Bruce, looking down.
He can't explain to Bruce what it was like, to go to his funeral. He knows the man didn't want one, knows that he wanted to be cremated and put to rest without fanfare, but they couldn't do it. Even Alfred's urging to not have a funeral for Batman had been painful. No goodbyes. No paying respects. Of course he understood Alfred's logic, but it had been painful.
A handful of friends had attended the very private civilian ceremony. They hadn't been able to speak freely, mourn freely. It hadn't been their place.
Clark hadn't managed to say goodbye at all.
He can't compare the funeral they did not have to this reunion they're having now, but he wants to try. "Look at them. What do you see?"
Bruce is quiet for a while, studying the different groups. "This is a big security threat. All the heroes in one place, this is just like Ollie and Dinah's wedding. Well, the first one. A catastrophe waiting to happen."
Clark rolls his eyes. "I see a group of people who feels much more at ease knowing you're back. I see your friends laughing and moving more freely. I see you," he pauses, looking at Bruce's reflection on the glass, "being cherished. We didn't have a funeral, so we couldn't share our loss and our memories. It felt... unfinished."
"I didn't want a funeral," he says softly.
"You have never been a center stage kind of guy. I guess it was only natural that... it would blindside us. It was unthinkable, to lose you."
"Clark, that's ridiculous. I'm a man. Dying is not unthinkable, it's inevitable."
"Well, it blindsided me. Last thing I said to you was that I was sure you could hold the fort for a few hours. Then you were gone. I felt like such an idiot. I should have been there."
"I don't need babysitting."
"I know. I should have been there, anyway. If we had been together... you shouldn't have had to face that alone."
"I didn't," he says. Clark is giving his back to the bay windows now, leaning against the glass, looking at his friend. "I couldn't remember who I was or what had happened. I was lost in the fog, but I remembered you. And Diana. And Batman. Odd, isn't it? I didn't even think of myself as Batman. It was just something I knew, something to hold on to." Bruce bites his lower lip, worrying it as he keeps looking at the people on the floor below. "I remembered you." He meets his eyes, winter blue meeting azure. "I wish I had been here. For New Krypton."
"You were with me," Clark says, his voice low. "Every time it got rough, you were with me."
Bruce shakes his head. "It wasn't enough."
"We're together now," he says, clasping a black clad shoulder. "We can do it. You'll slow down and I..." he trails off, unsure. He will get over it? Forget his frustration, his outrage, his grief? Forget that out there are people who cheer the destruction of New Krypton, people who celebrate the genocide?
"You'll trust me."
Clark chuckles without much humor. "I always trust you."
"Then it's settled. We're going to make it."
Clark feels his throat close, and he laughs again, this time a little less darkly. He nods. "Okay. Should we shake on it?"
Bruce gives him a look that's half disbelief and half annoyance, and then he's stepping closer, putting his arms around Clark, the void he carries with him closing over Clark. He feels weightless for a moment, adrift in the vast tenderness of the shadows, and then he's returning the embrace, arms tight around Bruce's back, no longer adrift and no longer weighted down by a burden unshared.
They can turn their worries into plans, their burdens into anchors, their tragedies into a purpose that guides their way.
And once they're done, they'll still have each other.
Title: Something fast
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Superman+Batman
Word Count: 4300+
Summary: Bruce is back, and Clark is back, and neither of them is doing too well on their own.
References: Oh man. Okay, random references to JLA New Maps of Hell, JLA Divided We Fall, Superman Beyond, Final Crisis, World of New Krypton. THIS GOT A BIT OUT OF CONTROL.
Spoilers: For War on Superman, if you don't know what happened to Kal, Kara and New Krypton, and for Return of Bruce Wayne, if you haven't read RoBW #2.
I´ve had my frustrations about the pains of daily life
I´ve tasted degradation and found the lace and candle light
But we have the weights we have the measures of our days and nights
I´ve had my frustrations but now I´ve found my place
And you will make it
But only if you run
-Only if you run, Julian Plenti
He's staring at the monitors, heedless of everything going on around them. Or at least he seems not to notice, but Clark knows better than that. Knows him better than that.
He moves closer, steps behind the chair. The smell of leather, Kevlar and jet fuel is like an aura around him, the bouquet of a dark, strong wine. Around the edges there is the faintest of smells. Nothingness. The void.
Ever since he came back -and Clark clings to this thought like a life line: he came back, he survived, he is here- there is something about him that doesn't quite fit. Like a black hole, he commands his attention every time they're together, swallowing the world around him into the darkness between the folds of his cape. And that smell of the infinite void.
"B," he says softly, and Batman startles. "Why don't you let that be for a while? Everyone gathered to see you, you know. Time to be all smiles," he says, teasingly. The black clad shoulders before him move a fraction, straightening just enough to make him look determined.
Batman tilts his head, and he's looking at Superman out of the corner of his eyes. He doesn't turn to look at him -and it aches just a bit, the way Bruce has been avoiding his gaze- but there's a small smile on his lips, something that wouldn't be a smile on any other man.
"All smiles. Okay," Batman says and pushes his chair back to stand up. "No guarantees." Bruce turns to see him, as if he's about to say something, but then quickly looks away, his jaw setting.
Clark feels his stomach turn. Everything is still so awkward, and he wishes it wasn't, he wants-- he wants his best friend back, he wants to hold him, he needs-- he doesn't know what he needs. He feels like he has a hole inside himself, cold and endless, something that hurts so much that he can't look at it without feeling like he's drowning in rage and despair.
"Don't."
Clark is startled by the the commanding tone, but Batman is now scanning the room. The Hall of Justice is full of people, fellow heroes and friends, but they are giving them space, talking among themselves, letting Batman approach them at his own time. Some of them are intimidated by the man and give him space out of a mix of fear and respect. The others know him well enough not to crowd him.
"Don't go," Bruce's voice only seems vaguely directed at Clark.
Clark answers anyway. "I'm right here."
Batman turns to face him, their eyes locking. The impossible gravity that pulls at Clark intensifies and Bruce leans forward, clamping a gloved hand on his arm. "No, you aren't. Not all the time," he says, a thread of infinite sadness in his voice.
Clark's throat constricts and his eyes burn. The ghost image of debris in space is never far from his mind, the absolute silence, the cold memory gripping his heart. Batman pulls off his cowl and his gaze is unwavering, dark blue that speaks of abyssal depths. "We can do this," Bruce says.
Clark wants to curl inside the shadows of Batman's embrace, let the darkness that seems to have touched his friend at the end of time take over the empty spaces in his heart. Instead, he nods. They can do this.
---
"If you go back, you'll kill everyone! Don't do this!"
The words echo in his mind as he activates the time sphere, leaving his friends at the end of time.
He'll come back for them before the time line collapses, or he'll fail to save the 21st century and it won't matter, anyway.
He can't let this happen again. He can't.
He can never go home.
---
He can feel Superman's presence two steps behind him, a lodestone that pulls at him with irresistible force. Everything is a blur unless he's concentrating in the here and now, his attention fully on his surroundings. But it's hard, and there are so many people, people he doesn't even remember meeting.
He wants his life back, his family, his city, his friends. His own brand of madness, fighting crime and dealing with psychopaths. Not... this.
He wishes he could forget. Tells himself eventually he might. It's too much, so it might slip his mind, go dormant like a dragon, a volcano.
A curse.
Clark is touching him.
The world refocus around Clark for a second, and then it's lost again as he studies the lines around his eyes, the downward turn of his mouth. There's a permanent strain in his jaw, and his eyes that should be as blue as the clearest sky are clouded with grief. The set of his shoulders, the tightness of his back. Even his balance is off, like he carries a great weight.
"Bruce," Clark says, his voice finally piercing his thoughts. "Do you have a headache?"
Bruce nods, grabbing the excuse so he can get out of here.
Clark is touching him.
Superman leads him to an empty room at the Hall of Justice -the lab, Batman recognizes it, and with a pang of exasperation notices the equipment still hasn't been upgraded. He had meant to, had planned to do that after Orion's murder case had been solved, but then...
"Earth to Bruce," Clark says, and he has a small smile on his lips, but it quickly turns into a frown as Bruce collapses over a chair. "Are you okay?"
"I can't be Batman," he says, the words spilling from his lips like a confession, and he feels a pang of loss when he hears them. "I can't be Batman anymore. It's too much information. I can't focus. I didn't think it would be so hard to be here."
"Here?"
He can hear the restrained pain in Clark's voice, and he wants to punch himself for making him sound even more tight wounded than he already does. He needs to get himself together. For Clark, at least. For now. He throws his head back, closes his eyes. "Here. Now. The present. This present, that is. I was-" he gestures vaguely with his hands, then cuffs one of his ears, leaning against his hand, trying to make the darkness behind his eyes stop spinning. "I was going too fast and now I can't seem to fall back in step."
He can hear Clark crouching in front of him, and he opens his eyes. "You will," Clark says, his voice like steel. "We can do this."
He nods once, unconvinced, and then a thought crosses his mind. An excuse, meaningless, and he feels laughter building inside him, an impulse completely out of control. He's on the verge of a nervous breakdown, he realizes, but he can't seem to stop shaking. He starts chuckling, the world falling out of focus again.
"I just need more time."
---
By the time he realizes he needs help to close the hypertime dimension rift, the 21st century is a cauldron of hellish creatures wrecking havoc across the fabric of time and space. He understands now how the rift works -it took a long time, figuring out Hypertime at Vanishing Point- and of course it's not linear, there is no reason for it to be linear with cube time.
Five times he jumped through time.
Five cracks in the fabric of reality.
The 21st century is lost, now. Thanks to the influence of the cube time forces, he can't restore the 21st century from any point of the time line. He needs to move outside the time line. Find a way to copy a segment of time from a different string where he never made it home, where the rift was never created, and graft it into this time line. And then he can close the rifts in the past. Without something to save, patching the past will be useless.
The time sphere has two directions: back and forward, he needs a way to make it move sideways.
He gets to work.
---
Bruce isn't laughing anymore. The silence in the lab is suffocating, the only sounds being Bruce's steady breathing and his own choked sobs. He can't look at Bruce. His eyes are empty, his gaze far away, and Clark is alone.
He can't do this alone.
They have done things that are unexplainable. Impossible. Unthinkable. They have defeated terrible odds, they have snatched victory out of defeat again and again in this partnership that seems so incongruous, so unlikely. They have been to the end of the universe. They have been to the end of other universes, to the places beside the universe where everything is more.
Clark has held inside himself the Bleed, the substance that sustains reality itself, he poured it into Lois Lane to save her. He built a miracle machine and wished for a happy ending.
He feels anything but happy now.
He feels a hand threading through his hair, and Bruce shifts under his weight. He doesn't dare look up from where he's kneeling, leaning over his arms on Bruce's legs.
"What are you going to do?" Clark asks, his voice low and ragged. His eyes are dry but his throat hurts.
"I don't know. Fix it." Bruce's fingers close and he's pulling Clark's head back to make him look at him. "We didn't do all that to come back home and be a complete mess, did we?"
"It kind of looks like we did," Clark says, shrugging Bruce's hand off. Bruce snorts, and he's smiling now, a real smile. Even if he's not looking into Clark's eyes, Clark has never been able not to smile back at him. "Any ideas?"
"Well," Bruce starts, and then he meets his gaze. Clark feels the imperious pull again, the way it soothes something inside him, a restlessness that's been with him since the battle with Darkseid. "I know what's wrong with me. Do you know what's wrong with you?"
Clark looks incredulous for a moment. Can he even begin to list what's wrong with him, with the world? But then he nods. New Krypton. He's lost Krypton again. His adoptive planet destroyed Krypton's second improbable chance, and because Lex Luthor hasn't turned up and General Lane committed suicide and a thousand other nonsensical, absurd things that shouldn't happen but do, there's no justice to be had. New Krypton is gone.
"I can't fix what's wrong with me. Only--" Bruce snorts again, "Only time can."
Clark can see that his eyes are not empty, he's not gone, but it feels like Bruce is falling into the event horizon, collapsing into a black hole.
"What about you, Clark? Can we fix what's wrong with you?"
Clark breaks the eye contact, his teeth grinding, his lips a thin line. "I don't know. Can we undo the genocide of my people? Find them some justice? Not that... not that justice would bring them back. Rao," he says, sitting back on the floor, getting some distance between him and Bruce. He props his head on one of his hands, trying to hold himself upright. It's an impossible weight, the guilt, the anger, the resentment, the grief. "Everyone, Bruce. I researched the customs and culture of Krypton for years in the Fortress, devouring all the data I could find on my parent's planet, trying to figure out how they lived, what they thought, trying to fill in all the blank spaces that the Fortress AI couldn't. It could tell me the dates of the festivals, but it couldn't tell me about the children squealing with delight at the Artists guild's sculptures. It went on and on about the complexity of the light shows for the festival of Rao and Yuna, but it did nothing to prepare me for the reality of it, the sense of kindship, of... it was so rich, Bruce, I only lived in New Krypton for a year, and I felt like I was barely scratching the surface. I met such great people. They never backed down, you should have seen them, they were so stubborn and-- and they did atrocious things, too. Rao, they were terrible and kind and strong and awful." The words kept spilling from his lips, each memory a thorn on his side, his voice raw. "Aunt Alura, she... you would have liked her, she was..." He took a deep breath, unable to put into words the kind of woman Kara's mother had been. "Complex. So complex. Everything was..."
"Alive," Bruce says softly once it's clear Clark can't continue. "It was real. Not just pictures and textbook information on the Fortress. It was alive."
"It's all gone. Everyone is dead."
The silence that falls over the room is filling Clark's lungs like warm water. Kara. If this is killing him, he can't imagine what it's doing to Kara, to lose her family all over again, to have her home snatched from her again. And he can't even say anything, what is there to say? All he can do is hold her, and he feels so brittle. A low keening sound escapes his lips with every breath, and he feels ashamed to be weak, to be so weak in front of Bruce. He wasn't been able to save New Krypton, and here he is, wailing like a child, like that might make a difference.
"What should we get to first?"
Clark closes his eyes tightly and shakes his head, confused. "What?"
"Which of these two things should we tackle first? Bringing the responsible to justice, or getting New Krypton back?"
"Bruce--"
"You see," Bruce says, leaning forward, and the event horizon is gone. Bruce is the black hole, no longer falling into it, but inhabiting it. "I don't think there's anything we can't do, Clark. And you need this. You need this to not have happened. When men are pushed past their limits, they break. I can't have you bearing this. It's all very simple, with the right perspective."
"I won't break. I won't let this break me. This is not so simple, Bruce."
"I did not mean you," he says, a distant smile on his lips. "Clark, we can make this simple." Bruce hesitates then, and he seems to be anchored in the now for a moment. "Do you know what I did to the time line?".
---
He finds the moment before Darkseid falls into the black hole at the beginning of time, just after the New God sends him to the past via the Omega Sanction. He could stop Darkseid from sending him back, but it'll just create another time line. Time line A of Universe Zero has been anchored by the hyperfauna infestation he caused by opening the rift at the 21st century. But here, at this moment, with time collapsing into itself, he can access other time lines. If he wants to access cube time, this is where he has to do it.
He waits for the right moment.
The right moment is the wrong one the first eleven jumps.
The twelfth time, he waits until Superman makes his wish in the miracle machine.
'Let there be a happy ending.'
Bruce smiles, the longing he's feeling making him double over in the time sphere. He needs to get home. He can't bear this anymore.
He jumps, and this time he makes
it
to
cube
time.
----
Clark is looking at him, horrified, and he still won't say anything. Bruce explains his theories, wild as they are, because he can't stand the way Clark is looking at him.
"See, Space B is like a virus. Or no, not a virus. A bacteria, complex enough to have genes and-- you see, in cube time, Space B is a primitive life form. The orrery of worlds, the strings of time-- the music of the spheres itself, if you will, it's just a primitive creature. So I thought-- it's just building blocks after all, like proteins, so if a time line is split in two whenever anything has two possible outcomes, then decisions -- no, uncertainty itself, that's the building blocks of time lines. It's... you can split them and graft them if you find the right point, insert your custom-arranged proteins. Or if you can't arrange them -I suppose hyperfauna could, if they cared to engineer Space B lifeforms- but if you can't, then you can take pre-existing code and graft it."
Clark says nothing.
"I didn't destroy any time lines. I-- I don't think I did. At Vanishing Point, I located Time line A of Universe Zero, and all the other time lines diverge from this one, at least in our Space B." Bruce puts his head on his hands, closing his eyes. "Or-- that's how I saw it. I mean, how was I supposed to see it? A Space A creature looking down at Space B from Cube Time. Clark, I don't know. I just.. I could see the point where I had broken the membrane, the omega sanction and-- and how we had punctured Space B, the infestation growing from the 21st century to the past and to the future. Consuming it. And all the time lines it intersected, they were being infested too."
Bruce just sits there, thinking, trying to forget the vast eldritch things that had touched him, the things he had seen that could not be perceived by human eyes but that could not be ignored, either. "See," he says after a while. "New Krypton is out there. We can get it back. We can.. graft it. Or copy it. We could... we could steal it, too, if we find a string that ends there. The possibilities are... infinite."
"Bruce."
Bruce hadn't tell them any of this when he had picked them up again at Vanishing Point, recruiting their help to close the rifts in the past. By the time he had picked them up, he had already erased the infestation from the time line.
"Are you telling me that you.. deleted a part of the time line? And replaced it?"
"I didn't delete it. It was set adrift. Expelled from our Space B, so the infection could consume it but not touch everything else. I... I did destroy the 21st century, though. A version of the 21st century."
"But how?"
"It wasn't hard. From Cube Time." He can't explain it, he can't explain what happened to him, what had to happen. He doesn't have any words for it, he can't even understand it. It had just happened, because-- because it had to.
"Bruce," Clark says, his voice still raw, but full of concern instead of drowning with grief. "Are you okay?"
Bruce laughs, and he suspects the laugh itself is answer enough. "No. Not... yet."
Clark nods. He seems thoughtful for a long moment. "I want New Krypton back first." He says, determined. "I don't want anyone to forget what their part in this was, but..."
"A second chance. For New Krypton."
"I don't know. Second? It feels like we have had so many chances now."
"It's all relative. Second chances are limitless."
Clark raises an eyebrow at that. "We need you to slow down."
"After this is done."
Clark is looking at him, and he feels the pull, the need. He wants to collapse in Clark's arms, to be held together by his strength. He closes his eyes again and leans back on the lab chair, trying to drift off.
---
"Before the eclipse starts, you have sketch this. One of us at each eclipse, holding a piece of the memetic program."
Everyone's staring at him like he's insane except for Superman. None of the others faced Z, none of them saw Kyle drawing a concept that worked as a machine when you looked at it. But Clark had, and once you have Superman on your side, things are a lot easier.
"I don't see how this--" Rip starts, but Superman interrupts him.
"It will work." Superman is looking at him, a confidant smile on his lips, something like awe in his eyes. "I trust you."
"Good." He calls up each of the sigils in the time sphere's screens. Together, they form a lattice that makes him feel dizzy to look at, something that seems to repel the ghost touch of the things he'd faced in cube time.
"Superman's shield is in there," Hal says. "And... Wonder Woman's. The Lantern. Flash's lightning..."
"Yes. All of them," he says, looking at the finished seal. He worked in everything he could, each piece of the Age of Heroes a benediction to all living things. "Let's go."
One by one, he drops his friends at the right moment, just minutes from the eclipse. They'll have time to spare to engrave the sigils.
Booster is the last one. Before he walks out of the time sphere, he turns to look at him and flashes him a parting smile. "Good to have you back, Bruce."
Bruce nods, unable to say anything.
Back.
He'll be back soon.
Not to a burning landscape, not to the end of time. Not the apocalypse he had brought forth for the 21st century the first time around.
He's finally going home.
---
"I want you to see something," Clark says after a while, and stands up, hovering in front of Bruce, waiting for the other man to acknowledge him -to come back from wherever he is.
He offers him a hand, and Bruce takes it, standing up. The pull is there again, a thrill that starts at the point of contact and spreads to every inch of his body, demanding more.
He leads Bruce through various halls until they reach one of the bays. Below them, the reunion goes on, and up here there's a faint sound of laughter and conversation that was missing at the lab. He gestures towards the bay window, and stands beside Bruce, looking down.
He can't explain to Bruce what it was like, to go to his funeral. He knows the man didn't want one, knows that he wanted to be cremated and put to rest without fanfare, but they couldn't do it. Even Alfred's urging to not have a funeral for Batman had been painful. No goodbyes. No paying respects. Of course he understood Alfred's logic, but it had been painful.
A handful of friends had attended the very private civilian ceremony. They hadn't been able to speak freely, mourn freely. It hadn't been their place.
Clark hadn't managed to say goodbye at all.
He can't compare the funeral they did not have to this reunion they're having now, but he wants to try. "Look at them. What do you see?"
Bruce is quiet for a while, studying the different groups. "This is a big security threat. All the heroes in one place, this is just like Ollie and Dinah's wedding. Well, the first one. A catastrophe waiting to happen."
Clark rolls his eyes. "I see a group of people who feels much more at ease knowing you're back. I see your friends laughing and moving more freely. I see you," he pauses, looking at Bruce's reflection on the glass, "being cherished. We didn't have a funeral, so we couldn't share our loss and our memories. It felt... unfinished."
"I didn't want a funeral," he says softly.
"You have never been a center stage kind of guy. I guess it was only natural that... it would blindside us. It was unthinkable, to lose you."
"Clark, that's ridiculous. I'm a man. Dying is not unthinkable, it's inevitable."
"Well, it blindsided me. Last thing I said to you was that I was sure you could hold the fort for a few hours. Then you were gone. I felt like such an idiot. I should have been there."
"I don't need babysitting."
"I know. I should have been there, anyway. If we had been together... you shouldn't have had to face that alone."
"I didn't," he says. Clark is giving his back to the bay windows now, leaning against the glass, looking at his friend. "I couldn't remember who I was or what had happened. I was lost in the fog, but I remembered you. And Diana. And Batman. Odd, isn't it? I didn't even think of myself as Batman. It was just something I knew, something to hold on to." Bruce bites his lower lip, worrying it as he keeps looking at the people on the floor below. "I remembered you." He meets his eyes, winter blue meeting azure. "I wish I had been here. For New Krypton."
"You were with me," Clark says, his voice low. "Every time it got rough, you were with me."
Bruce shakes his head. "It wasn't enough."
"We're together now," he says, clasping a black clad shoulder. "We can do it. You'll slow down and I..." he trails off, unsure. He will get over it? Forget his frustration, his outrage, his grief? Forget that out there are people who cheer the destruction of New Krypton, people who celebrate the genocide?
"You'll trust me."
Clark chuckles without much humor. "I always trust you."
"Then it's settled. We're going to make it."
Clark feels his throat close, and he laughs again, this time a little less darkly. He nods. "Okay. Should we shake on it?"
Bruce gives him a look that's half disbelief and half annoyance, and then he's stepping closer, putting his arms around Clark, the void he carries with him closing over Clark. He feels weightless for a moment, adrift in the vast tenderness of the shadows, and then he's returning the embrace, arms tight around Bruce's back, no longer adrift and no longer weighted down by a burden unshared.
They can turn their worries into plans, their burdens into anchors, their tragedies into a purpose that guides their way.
And once they're done, they'll still have each other.